Seminar on March 24, 2022

Title

Bioinformatics and its relation to data and computer science

Speaker

Prof. Jaap Heringa, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands

When and Where

March 24, 2022, 17:30-18:30
Online, see https://www.informatics-europe.org/survey/index.php/783866/lang-en for registration

Abstract

Bioinformatics is at the crossroads of computer science, mathematics, biology and physical chemistry, and has become indispensable in modern biology and medicine. It is predominantly a data science, studying systems with billions of components, for example constituting an organism with a complex and dynamic relationship with its environment. Gaining actionable insight in molecular systems often requires detailed knowledge about the functioning and interactions of components, which should be implemented in large-scale analytics and modelling pipelines. Computational methods have abounded in bioinformatics, for example based on evolutionary considerations such as common ancestry, which allow comparative analyses of DNA or protein sequences across organisms, or based on network representations to model molecular interactions. More recently and given the multimodal and distributed nature of bioinformatics data resources, semantic web technologies and FAIR data principles have become increasingly important, the acuteness of which was underscored dramatically by the recent and ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. In this webinar, Prof. Heringa will give an introduction to bioinformatics, including its origin, historical developments and the type of research problems tackled in the field.

Short Bio

Jaap Heringa is full professor of Bioinformatics at Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam, The Netherlands since 2002, and head of the Department of Computer Science at VU since 2018. He has been scientific co-director of the Netherlands Bioinformatics Centre (NBIC) from 2009-2013. Heringa has served as deputy Head of Node of ELIXIR-NL (i.e. the Dutch node of the ESFRI Landmark ELIXIR)) from 2013-2016, and is Head of Node since April 2016. Since 2014 he is director of the Netherlands Bioinformatics and Systems Biology Research School (BioSB) and as of January 2016 he is scientific lead of the Dutch Techcentre for Life Sciences (DTL). Heringa has been executive editor of Computational Chemistry and Biology (Elsevier) from 2014-2018 and was founding editor of Molecular Data Science (Elsevier) in 2018-2020. His areas of research are Bioinformatics and Systems Biology, while current research interests revolve around formal modelling strategies, sequence analysis, protein structure and interaction prediction, cancer-related data integration, molecular data science, data stewardship (FAIR data principles) and data-tools interoperability.